A week after finalising the sale of my old house, I realised there was a key I'd forgotton to pass on to the new owners. It was only an old-fashioned generic key, but  the sense of closure inherent in divesting myself of it appealed to me. When I went to see my selling agents for the last time, however, I forgot all about it. I hugged the agents at that last meeting (sick, right? Money'll do that to you), and sent them a thank you card a few days later, so I really didn't fancy dropping in on them just to hand over a key. So I kept it. And guess what? The back door of my new house has a generic lock on it, and the key works. 

The reappropriation of detritus from around my new property continues. This galvanized trash can was in one of the sheds. After installing a 7000-gallon rainwater tank one metre into the ground, I needed something that would enable me to reach the lever after the area around it was backfilled. This is what my artist/auteur jack-of-all-trades came up with.

That same week, he sourced a second-hand piano for my eight-year-old, who has been having lessons since the start of the year. I'd been dreading the amount of money I was looking at spending for a reconditioned piano, and he came up with the idea of convincing another client, who owned a piano but whose children had long since stopped playing ,to let me have his on permanent loan.    

While watching TV commercials last night, I was appalled by the push to buy everyday cleaning products that were laced with toxic and corrosive substances. Antibacterial handwash? Surface spray with bleach? As far as I’m concerned, antiseptic is for first aid, and bleach is for cleaning the blood off the walls after you’ve murdered someone. Our house is Domestos and Dettol-free, and I don’t think we’ve suffered unduly from the 99.9% of germs we can’t see. There’d be a lot of them, too, since most of the things we own - including the toys - are onto their second lease of life.

I recently sold my house. As a relatively modest house, it was marketed under the heading
"Perfect Start”. Modest houses, however, are just as likely to be bought by downsizers as first-home buyers; and it was indeed a downsizing couple who ended up buying my house. So if it wasn't for the fact that real estate-land is such a peppy place, it could have been advertised, “Perfect Finish”.

Candle holder, $6

The big supermarket chains are rather good at profiting from the sale of reusable shopping bags, but they aren’t quite so good at getting customers to actually use them. I thought it must have been an impossible ask: how can you make demands of customers? But then I went to Aldi. At Aldi, most customers walk into the store with their reusable shopping bags tucked under their arm and have no intention of taking a plastic one. It appears that bringing your own bags is a natural extension of knowing that you will be packing your own groceries, that you will be responsible for packing your own groceries. And all it took for Aldi to make this happen was to offer customers markedly cheaper groceries.

Having failed thus far to find an attractive set of hooks to hang my collection of shopping bags on, I improvised by buying this pre-loved candle-holder and taking off the drip guards.



Econo cloth, $1

I once complimented someone on the state of their house. This person had been to my house several times and, worried that she might have inadvertently shown me up, she hurriedly said, “Thank you. But you know… I don’t think of cleanliness as a moral thing.” Well, me neither. But I did feel shown up because it occurred to me then that as compliments go, the one I’d just paid was pretty lame. So I don’t compliment people on the state of their homes anymore; I just continue to apologise for the state of mine.

This cleaning cloth is made by The Smith Family, using scraps from the textile industry.